Month: July 2008

Some of you have wondered how my passionate opposition to torture can be reconciled with my tolerance of the new FISA regime. And the invasion of our correspondence and communications by the government is indeed a threat to liberty; and there is no denying that our liberties have been seriously eroded by the last few years in this respect. I just understand that some loss is defensible in the war we now fight, and wire-tapping, if monitored by the Congress, a FISA court, as well as the executive is a price we may have to pay to keep our intelligence accurate. Torture, on the other hand, is a far more invasive attack on liberty, a threat to reliable intelligence, a danger to our own troops, a violation of treaty obligations, and an act of human cruelty inimical to the core meaning of the West.

I made the case the best I could three years ago in TNR for why I think torture is in a separate category. The essay is here. Two key points:

Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person’s will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human.

And:

The very concept of Western liberty sprung in part from an understanding that, if the state has the power to reach that deep into a person’s soul and can do that much damage to a human being’s person, then the state has extinguished all oxygen necessary for freedom to survive.

That is why, in George Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, the final ordeal is, of course, torture. Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation. If the point of the U.S. Constitution is the preservation of liberty, the formal incorporation into U.S. law of the state’s right to torture–by legally codifying physical coercion, abuse, and even, in Krauthammer’s case, full-fledged torture of detainees by the CIA–would effectively end the American experiment of a political society based on inalienable human freedom protected not by the good graces of the executive, but by the rule of law.

I know wire-tapping, even monitored by three branches of government, is a loss of liberty. But nothing is as corrosive as torture to the possibility of Western freedom. It is vital that we expose the war crimes that have been committed, ensure they cannot happen again, and bring the criminals to justice.

The referee is drunk?

R&R try to net the upper middle class for the Republicans:

The challenge for Republicans is to find a set of wedge issues that will enable them to do the same thing with the upper middle class — issues that convince proto-Bobos in Northern Virginia or suburban New Jersey that they have more in common with Sam’s Club conservatism than with the silk-stocking liberalism that they’re increasingly embracing.

Wedge issues? I’m working on a few posts on the many merits of Ross’ and Reihan’s book, but I should say by far the least appealing aspect of it is the lip-curling contempt the book often shows toward the prosperous middle and upper middle classes. "Silk-stocking liberalism" and "proto-bobos" and "lifetyle liberalism" are phrases and attitudes that don’t exactly help appeal to the very people the GOP has lost.

You’d think the successful, educated inhabitants of the newly prosperous cities might evince some kind of respect, especially since many are exhibiting the 1950s virtues R&R admire and want the Sam’s Club demographic to embrace. But no: the book sometimes crackles with contempt for these people. And after the horrors of Rove, is it really necessary to use expressions like "wedge issues" to advance your case? Either the proposals are worthy on their merits, or they are not.

R&R talk of some of Nixon’s virtues. But they also sometimes give in to Nixon’s fatal flaw: his deep resentment of educated elites, contempt and loathing for yuppie liberals and a great deal of animus toward the cool kids in class. This can undermine otherwise worthwhile ideas. It alienates unnecessarily.

Drudge is touting evidence of its phoniness. Could we be facing another pre-war Iraq situation? Could we risk a global war for smoke and mirrors?

I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to McCain’s social security gaffe, mostly because McCain didn’t call social security itself a disgrace, as some on the left are whining, but called the way we are funding it a disgrace. Here’s what he said:

Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed.

Good for McCain. The only problem with this statement, as Ezra points out:

[John McCain] seems to believe that at some other point in history, retiree benefits were paid for through taxes contributed by former workers, or possibly the retirees themselves. But, as Dean Baker says, "present-day retirees have always been paid their benefits from the taxes paid by current workers. That has been true from Social Security’s inception." And it would remain true, incidentally, in the partial privatization plans that McCain and other conservatives favor: Those plans would still see Social Security funded out of payroll taxes, with current workers subsidizing current retirees.

Coupled with Gramm’s gaffe, this became a pretty rough economics week for McCain.

World famous polar bear Knut sticks out his tongue as he sits in his enclosure at the zoo in Berlin on July 11, 2008. By Michel Kappeler/AFP/Getty.

Phillip Carter questions Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik’s optimism about Iraqi troop readiness:

…it’s important to note the forces he’s not talking about — namely, the local Iraqi police, the Iraqi national police, and all of the Iraqi government institutions responsible for supporting the security forces. Those are still in dreadful condition, notwithstanding the steady improvement helped by the infusion of American advisers and support. Ideally, it is these forces, and not the Iraqi Army, who will patrol the streets of Iraq and keep its people secure. That Dubik devoted so much of his attention to the Iraqi Army is telling — and a sign that we have a long way to go.[…]

When I came home from Iraq, I thought it would take at least five to ten more years of sustained advisory assistance to build the Iraqi police force. I still think that’s right. The Iraqi Army is further ahead, largely because that’s been the main effort for the American military. But if our only legacy in Iraq is the Iraqi Army, we will not leave a stable and secure Iraq in our wake — let alone a democracy dedicated to the rule of law.

Johann Hari offers some good sense:

Sadomasochists are as sane as the rest of us. The psychologist Stephenson Connoley found they were no more likely to be depressed or insane than you or me. It doesn’t appeal to me, but it seems to be a way some people leech out their anger or lack of control. Fine. Let them.

There is an easy solution. In Britain, you are currently allowed to consent to injury in four specific situations: sport, surgery, piercing, and circus performing. Why not add sadomasochistic sex?

With some help from computer graphics, via Second Life, a dive into a Van Gogh painting:

Bryan Appleyard responds to James Bowman’s paleocon lament about Hollywood:

The movies are as full of heroes as they ever were, though it may be true to say that the apparent horizon of heroism has narrowed. It is a commonplace of contemporary heroes that they are aware of their limitations and do not, unless they are superheroes, expect to save the nation or the world. Indeed, it is a crucial aspect of their heroism that they fight on in spite of this. To wish, as Bowman does, that the movies would feed an (entirely fictional) audience appetite for supposedly traditional heroes is to miss the peculiar beauty of which both film and especially TV is now capable.